"I was also very interested in an exploration of a secret agency whose functionality has become degraded by thirty years of failure with only small successes. The idea of the irrationality of human beings and of human organizations—these issues are always on my mind. Along with the vagaries of science, the ways in which science itself is not particularly objective, and sometimes doesn’t even know it is. Take, for example, the recent finding that mice are more frightened of men than women because of their smell, and thus the research using mice may have been skewed for many decades. It’s the kind of absurdity that crops up all the time, and yet our central narrative continues to be one focusing on efficiency and progress."
Jeff Vandermeer about Authority, in Reactor magazine, May 2014.
